May 20, 2013

I'm just revisiting this Howard Jacobson piece in The Independent slagging Stephen Hawking and the judge in the FUCU tribunal. Jacobson took his time responding to that FUCU judgment which made him and his fellow band of zionist chancers look so ludicrous. It might be because he wanted to dish some dirt on Judge Anthony Snelson and it took him some time to find nothing and a little more time to make something up. Now look what he eventually came up with:

It was this same Judge Snelson, reader, who ruled in favour of a Muslim woman claiming the cocktail dress she was expected to wear, while working as a cocktail waitress in Mayfair, “violated her dignity”. Not for him the cheap shot of wondering what in that case she was doing working as a cocktail waitress in a cocktail bar in Mayfair. If she felt she was working in a “hostile environment”, then she was working in a “hostile environment”, which is not to be confused with a Jew feeling he is working in a hostile environment since with the abolition of anti-Semitism there is no such thing as an environment that’s hostile to a Jew. My point being that Judge Snelson’s credentials as a man who knows a bigot from a barmcake are impeccable.

Just a quick revisit of the FUCU case. The Jew in question was a man, Ronnie Fraser, who decided that his commitment to the zionist project is so much a part of his Jewish identity that campaigning against the State of Israel amounts to racially harassing him, even if many of the campaigners are Jewish. Now you might think, from what Jacobson is saying, that the outcome of the cocktail waitress case had to do with her being a Muslim. So now look at how the case was reported in HR Magazine. The headline is, Muslim cocktail waitress wins compensation in tight-fitting red dress sex discrimination case so you might think the whole discrimination thing was about her being a Muslim. But if you read the whole article you'll see this:

A panel led by employment judge Anthony Snelson found she held "views about modesty and decency which some might think unusual in Britain in the 21st century". But it upheld her claim that bar owners Spring and Greene had discriminated against her on the grounds of her gender.

They said of the dress: "Plainly, it related to her sex. It was gender-specific. The respondents did not introduce a summer uniform for male waiting staff. Unlike the women, the men were not required to switch to brightly coloured, figure-hugging garb."

Forcing her to wear the dress if she wanted to continue working at the bar "violated her dignity", the panel decided, and created a "humiliating" environment. It found: "Her perception was that wearing the dress would make her feel as if she was on show, as if she was being presented as one of the attractions that the Rocket Bar was offering its customers."In our view that perception was legitimate and not unreasonable. We are reinforced in this conclusion by the striking contrast between the dress and the dark, loose-fitting attire which would remain the men's uniform."

Now it doesn't get more cut and dried than that. This was a case of gender discrimination. Maybe her being a Muslim made her more culturally aware of the different way in which she was being treated from her male colleagues but that would be a complement to Muslims, not the put-down that Jacobson clearly intended.